Friday, August 29, 2014

One of the best parts of going back to school is meeting new
people. This summer did not disappoint. The types of people I had a chance to
interact with were diverse. For example, they were inspiring, strange,
knowledgeable, helpful, frustrating, pleasant, awkward, pragmatic, funny, and
caring. I’d be willing to guess that I too covered a similar range in their
assessment of interactions with me.

Watching Dr. Who:

Probably 80% of my nights were spent watching episodes of
the recent TV series, Dr. Who. I made it through several seasons during my
internship time. This was an integral part of my summer experience—a ritual to
end each day. Mostly, it was just a fun way to decompress at the end of the
day. However, there is also a creativity and curiosity to the show that fit my
overall internship experience. As the Dr. and his companions travel through
time and space making discoveries and saving planets, I hope I am doing
something similar in very much less grandiose, fictional, and direct ways.

Running at Cape Arago:

A few times each week I was able to park my car in Cape
Arago State Park and go for a short run along the road, through the forest,
along the cliffs, out to the viewpoint and back. I’d also take a detour into
the woods and find a somewhat level spot for practicing my Tae KwanDo forms.
This return of mine to the same exercise spot established a connection between
myself and the park. I got to know the sounds and smells along the way, and got
to see the place at different times of day in different weather. I will not
forget the place, and it will hold a special place in my heart.

The Amazing Little Things in the Ocean:

The accounts of one’s first look at phytoplankton under the
microscope are often full of marvel, and mine was no different: I marveled at
the marvelousness. What appears to the naked eye as brown slime becomes an
amazing array of jewel-like forms under the microscope. Not only are they organized
and intricate, they are also diverse. Learning to name and identify these
little gems was a true pleasure.

Giving the Final Powerpoint Talk:

I’m so glad the program included a final 15-minute
presentation of what we did over the summer. This gave me an opportunity to
review and personally organize some of the basics of what I learned over the
summer, the main emphasis of our research, and also to analyze some of our data.
It also gave me the experience of presenting the material in front of peers and
experts.

Looking at the Data:

There was something very satisfying about both putting the
data into a spreadsheet, and looking at it on graphs. In some ways it felt like
the experience of finally getting to taste something you’ve just spent a bunch
of time and energy cooking. Figuring out how to look at the data, and how to
think about it also resembles playing a game: you try different ideas, and
figure out which approach yields results.

Feeling Marine Science:

This is probably the most ineffable part of the experience. What
I mean by “feeling” marine science is likely vague. I’ll try to explain. First,
I’m not just talking about an immediate emotion I have in response to marine
science. Instead I’m trying to get at the overall gestalt of it in my
experience. I’m trying to look at the place, people, subject matter, climate,
and compatibility with my own interests. I’m asking the question, what does it
feel like for my life to be involved in the marine sciences? Another way of
putting it is, how does marine science fit on me? When I put it on, how does it
feel? As vague as this question may seem, it is equally difficult to answer. In
some ways the only answer is the actual experience of doing it. Trying to
describe it is like trying to describe a painting to someone instead of letting
them actually see it. Nevertheless there is likely some benefit to trying.

There is a quote from Confucius that reads, “The wise
find joy in water; the benevolent find joy in mountains.” There is more to the
quote, and the context of the statement is important in order to understand it.
However, what I find interesting about it is the idea that some are drawn to
the water and others to the mountains. And he seems to be saying there are
inherent characteristics of the person that make them so choose. This summer I
found myself asking this question, “Am I an ocean person?” I find the ocean
fascinating, beautiful, and mysterious. But do I feel it in my bones? The
answer came to me unexpectedly. I had been spending most of my time on the
beach, looking at the ocean, looking at water samples, smelling the ocean,
riding the waves. Then one day I went for a walk in the woods behind the
campus. The answer was the woods. When I was young I went on a roller coaster
ride that swirled through trees and greenery. It was magical. Every time I’m in
the woods they enchant me. On this walk through the woods behind campus I
remembered that I am a woods person. That doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t or
shouldn’t study marine science. I do think there is something to it though. I
even started to wonder if there are two different types of music. There is
music of the ocean and music of the woods. As I listened to different songs or
artists, it was consistently clear which was which. Bob Marley, Paul Simon, The
Beattles—they are ocean music. Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Bob Dylan—this is music
of the woods.

Thinking About My Future:

There was an informative talk during the summer about going
to graduate school in the marine sciences. I was surprised at how strongly I
reacted against the thought that I might be studying and working towards a
career in academia. It’s strange to me because I enjoy doing the studying and
the research, but the thought of becoming a professor again does not interest me
at all (at least not right now). I am more interested in working in a lab
somewhere to make discoveries and contributions, but not as an academic faculty
member. This presents some difficulty because my understanding is that much of
biological science study that has theoretical or creative roots leads in this
direction. The good thing is that I have a stronger sense of what I’m
interested in, and can make choices as I further my education that will lead in
the right direction.

My Favorite Picture from the Summer:

Finally, this is my favorite picture because I collected the
sample off the docks and discovered this little sea star brachiolaria larva.
What an amazing life form!

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

My last week was good. We presented our final presentations (as powerpoints) on August 15th. I pretty much explained what our results were and scanning electron microscopy and video analysis (I mentioned these in my previous posts).We picked up our first long term plates and our second set of short term plates on the 14th. Unfortunately we only had time to pick up and analyze our first set of short term plates (3 weeks).

We found that there was the most settlement on the plates at site number 3. This was equidistant between the site farthest away from the reef (site 5) and the site directly in the reef (site 1). We thought that this might be because there were less places for the larvae to settle on in this site so the larvae were more likely to choose our plates to settle as well as the surrounding reef. We found 3 major organisms; Barnacles, Hydroids (an example of this would be cup coral) and green worms. Barnacles were the most abundant.

Overall I loved doing this internship and it was a great opportunity. It was a lot of fun setting up the materials for the sites (creating the cement blocks and plates etc.). It was exciting and interesting to analyze and identify the species we found. I would like to than my mentor, Kirstin Meyer for allowing me to have this opportunity. I would also like to thank Coral Gehrke who was in charge of the other interns and I at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB). I would also like to thank the COSEE-PP Prime program and the National Science Foundation for making this possible. The students at OIMB were also friendly, supportive and interested in the project we were working on, so I would like to thank them as well.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

These last few weeks, I have learned more about myself and my (current) educational goals than anything else. As far as my internship is concerned, our team was busy wrapping up the last of the videos for Phase II. Our team also started to input data from the videos, I haven't learned this process yet.

The most exciting part of the last week was going over to my mentor's house, Brittany Huntington, for a classy Indian dinner! There was curry, fish, tandoori chicken, naan bread and more! Most importantly, I was able to get together with everyone from the South Beach ODFW office and socialize away from the work setting. It was really nice being able to talk to everyone in a personal matter, moving away from the professionalism for a moment.

Each of us interns, Cindy, Hannah and myself, received an "I <3 Marine Reserves" pin and a book signed by Matt Love! The irony for me is that Matt Love was my teacher for two years, and I was presented one of his books as an award!!!! I felt very honored, and couldn't stop laughing for twenty or so minutes.

Today is a new day, in a new week; and I am heading to the office. It's Wednesday, and I'm off to help with data entry and analysis. The end of my internship was the beginning of a new opportunity for me.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

These last 8 weeks have been a roller coaster of emotions both in my personal and professional life. I nearly began my internship by running to an Oregon State orientation my second week. It was a moving experience, and filled with academic optimism. Aside from that, I learned how to use several pieces of expensive equipment, including Adobe's newest version of Premiere, while interning for COSEE.

Awaiting Challenges

Just a few weeks before my internship I graduated both high school, and received my two-year degree. I hadn't known that I was accepted into COSEE's program, I also promised myself that I would keep my summer filled with education. Close to three months later, I can say I kept that promise to myself. I can't explain how much I've learned and accumulated during my internship this summer. I felt unprepared at heart for the adventures to come, but my brain assured me that I could take on the challenges that would fly my way this summer.

I banded with a team scientific warriors for a collaborative video analysis. Going through data sets with a fine toothed comb, sitting in front of Adobe's Premiere for five hours, with eyes sharp like razors. I met some very intelligent scientists, and stumbled across realities and opportunities I wouldn't have been able to fathom otherwise. I learned how to snorkel, beginning in the Passages of the Deep at the Oregon Coast Aquarium before going into the ocean with arms full of equipment.

In 8 short weeks, I have gained priceless amounts of pride and strength during my time at ODFW, thanks to the Hatfield Marine Science Center, Itchung Cheung, Coral Gehrke, COSEE's PRIME program, and several other people. I have a new undying appreciation for my native coastline, and have a desire to taste every bit of education within my grasp.

WHAT DID I LEARN PROFESSIONALLY?

If there is one big lesson I've learned; it's that scientific projects take a massive amount of teamwork and layover from different area. What do I mean by this? While Cyndi is busy in the field interviewing as many beach-goers as she can, people at the office are scoring under water video footage. Every few weeks a couple individuals go out in the field to SMURF, in order to asses how marine reserves are doing (see video below for a view of BNKY, or net to wrap around the buoy's that need to be collected).

Cyndi taking a breather at Otter Rock

Everyone seems to do their own part, in order to contribute to a larger goal, which is research. As you can see from the video below, Neal was looking one last time for any baby fish in the BNKY net, and continued to rinse the contents of the sea out. As a team, people on deck help her (or whoever is doing the task) get equipment on and off the vessel. Teamwork is essential within the core of science, otherwise there is not experiment of efficient setup!

WHAT DID I LEARN ABOUT MYSELF?I found a passion for snorkeling. To the left is an image of the Oregon Coast Aquarium's Rocky Shores exhibit in Passages of the Deep. Hannah and I went snorkeling twice at OCAq, mainly in the (first) Halibut Flats tank.

I also learned that I have an acute sensitivity to sea-sickness, but jumping in the ocean with your wetsuit quickly remedies that situation! Below is a video from Depoe Bay, as we were departing from their tiny port. This is perhaps one of my favorite places to launch, at least that I've discovered so far.

I discovered numerous local beautiful beach spots. My favorite spot of all isn't a beach, but rather a small recreational area at the mouth of the Salmon River in Lincoln City. I stumbled across this location when I went in the field with Cyndi. Of the two four times I've been with her to this location, I've seen maybe a dozen people.

I think the best part of my internship, is the connection I've made with ODFW. I plan on volunteering once a week in order to continue the project I was such a part of.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

I had one 'shell' of a time visiting our fellow interns over at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston, Or this past week. I also went crabbing with my brother over in Garibaldi where we encountered rough waves and biting chills of water splashes.

Upon arriving to OIMB, we were greeted with the sweet aroma to that of parking next to a cannery plant- oddly enjoyable on my end. It was unplanned, but within twenty minutes we were off to do field work at a nearby beach where we would collect plankton for later analysis. A five minute drive over with and there we were walking down a path that led us to a view I've yet not seen. The water was filled with gigantic bulb kelp that seemed to stretch four feet long. We hiked along the rocky edges of the beach which took us to a spot where we'd have a panoramic view of the ocean. After we got a few samples of the water, we headed back for the OIMB for lunch at the dining hall. It was a glorious spread of soup, cheese bread, salad, berry cobbler, lemonades and coffee. After fueling up on good food and equally good company, we later toured the dorms and office facilities. We then were able to sneak into some of the classrooms that were temporarily empty, among the one's seen were the: marine mammals and the bird and wildlife classrooms.

Cape Arago

mussels "muscle-ing" their way onto the rock

Classrooms

skeleton of common dolphin

skeleton of black-footed albatross

pelican

emperor penguin

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harbor seal

porpoise

We later visited Dr. Shank's lab and his wondrous collection of marine life. It was a bouquet of colors of all different kinds of textures, composition and structure. His grad student, Kristen Meyer also accompanied us along the tour and talked about her recent project. It was an insightful visit to OIMB, and I look forward to the progress and results of our upcoming projects from the COSEE internship the second week of August. I'm curious to see the experiences and knowledge that we've all come across with our time working with such great people and environment.

This week starts off with the NOAA NWFSC Fish Cutting Party! This isn't any old party, this was a party to dissect juvenile salmon. With each juvenile salmon, the following organs were separated and preserved for analysis: stomach, intestines, otolith, posterior kidney and a fin sample. Once you do more than one fish, it gets easier and faster to locate organs. I found it interesting to find and locate the otoliths since you age a fish depending on how many rings there are, just like tree rings. Updates on my project is that we have concluded analysis of data, and progressed to making visual representation of the coastal and bay data for Matt's and I final presentation. We are finishing up the project early this week because my mentors will be out of the office during my final week here in Newport. I've appreciated all of Waldo and Matt's hard work and time spent on assisting us COSEE Interns and allowing us to help and support the research being conducted. I'm also really looking forward to see other COSEE Intern presentations and hearing what they have to say about the whole COSEE experience! I ended my week with assisting Cindy at Otter Rock on Friday and Cascade Head on the following Sunday. With the visits to Otter Rock, I can say that it's one of perfect places to whale watch, tide pool in the punch bowl and end with a lunch at Mo's Seafood clam chowder! I also cannot forget interviewing a "peanut lady" who fed peanuts to the bountiful squirrel population in the bushes, and yes, she actually gave them names. Cascade Head is filled with amazing beach locations and wildlife viewing. I think one thing that really stood out from Cascade Head would be seeing wild elk on the first visit and mother deer with her two fawns on the second visit. Going South, Cape Perpetua has one the perfect locations to go hiking to see a 300 hundred year old spruce tree and a high viewpoint to over look the ocean. I couldn't also forget, South Beach State Park, a short walking distance from Hatfield. When my family visit's next weekend, I'll be giving them a tour of the Oregon Coast and let them view these beautiful locations.

Rocking that ODFW jacket!

While heading to Knight's Park, Cindy and I spotted a mother deer and her two fawns.

Over the past weeks, I have been looking forward to the Annual Nesika Illahee Pow-Wow in Siletz, Oregon. Attending pow-wow's isn't new to me since my family and I have always attended pow-wow's around the Seattle area. I think it's always exciting to since it's a community event to celebrate Native American culture and it's great to hear the drum groups play songs. Also Cindy and I were able to get a late night food run to Newport Cafe since I've told her about the delicious, massive Hawaiian Burger I ate last time. I have to say that they make a big, glorious cup of hot chocolate! I would definitely recommend stopping here when you get the chance.

Hello everyone! Let's start this week with the progress of the project. Since we have completed the Quality Control on all of the beam trawl data, we are taking the next steps to analyze the data. To interpret the all of the late 70's data, we will specifically be using species diversity measures, which measures biodiversity in plant and animal communities. Species diversity is broken down into the following concepts: richness, evenness and heterogeneity.This week, I learned about species diversity measures, specifically Rarefaction Method, Simpson's Index, Shannon-Wiener Function and Multi-response Permutation Procedures (MRPP). We are using these species diversity measures because we would like to analyze the all of the Oregon Coast beam trawls as a community. Each one of these functions can be calculated by the R program. The R program is a programming language software used for statistical computing. Learning about these methods was very new to me and challenging to understand, but I know these techniques will be very useful in the future as a researcher. We organized the four bays (Umpqua, Siletz, Tillamook, Alsea) and coastal data because we wanted to look at the species diversity separately to get concise results. With each analysis, our group looked at the significance of the grouping of data and species diversity. Here is an example of an analysis of the coastal data, excluding bay data. We organized the coastal data by 6 different depths: 0m-10m, 10m-20m, 20m-30m, 30m-40m, 40m-50m and 50m - Maximum m. The MRPP resulted in an A value = 0.03225 and a p-value = 0.001, we can infer that that the groups are more different than expected by chance. This means that the grouping of each of the 6 different depths species composition is more different than if you were to take a random sample from all of the data.Also at each depth, we statistically analyzed the species composition with the Rarefaction (Species Richness) Method, Shannon-Wiener Function and Simpson's Index. One trend that we saw was that the Butter sole (Isopsetta isolepsis) has an increasing presents with a depth of 30m-40m but then decreases to deeper depths. I think it's exciting to see the results of the community composition of the beam trawl surveys taken by Head Scientists, Earl E. Krygier and William G. Pearcy in the late 70's. Look forward to seeing our full results of the coastal and bay data on our presentation! This week also included a road trip to Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB) in Charleston, Oregon with all of the HMSC COSEE Interns. The drive was long but worth it since we got to tour the whole campus. We were able to attend Peter & Leyia's sample collection at Cape Arago State Park and their lab, classrooms and labs filled with marine organisms. It was great getting to know what research is being conducted at OIMB and seeing the progress of everyone's projects. There was a lot of interesting things to see, like the stuffed sea otter, a lower humpback whale jaw and the mysterious marine organisms in the Shank's Lab. We also had a very delicious lunch at the cafeteria, which it did live up to it's reputation from OIMB COSEE Interns. This trip was a great insight to the OIMB campus and where I will be attending in the future when I transfer to University of Oregon.

Friday, August 15, 2014

For half of last week and the
beginning part of this week, we traveled to Willapa Bay for the second time.
This trip was much easier, because all shell bags had been sampled. Our only
duties were to record video, and set out the breeder traps. An addition to this
trip was the use of a Fyke Net. The
Fyke net was a very large net that has two wings extending out to the sides
about 50 feet out. This was implemented so that we could catch what the breeder
traps were catching on a much larger scale. It was also helpful to see if there
were any larger species we had not caught yet, simply because they were too
large to fit in the breeder traps.

After returning from Willapa, the
other COSEE interns and I here at Hatfield had the opportunity to visit the
COSEE interns that have been working at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology
in Coos Bay. This was a very exciting trip, as I got to meet the other interns
for the first time. We also had the pleasure of receiving a tour of the facilities
there, getting the chance to see the interns’ work and their lab spaces. My
favorite part of this trip was having the opportunity to travel to one of the
field sites where two of the interns collect samples. This was beautiful
location! It was a great day of meeting new people, and getting to play on the
beach!

Thursday, August 14, 2014

This week I was responsible for processing
eelgrass samples that we had taken from our trip in Willapa. These were taken during
the shell bag sampling. Basically, we cut all of the above ground grass from
within the crab corral, and brought them back with us in order to have a dry weight taken (a dry weight is a
measure of mass after a sample has been dried, and had all excess liquid is removed
from it). We were hoping to find a correlation between the densities of
eelgrass within the structured habitats, and compare that to the amount of
crabs that settle within those areas. It is possible that crabs don’t simply
live an area with eelgrass present, but the amount of eelgrass could factor
into this choice as well. Therefore, by finding what the biomass was of each
sample that we took and comparing it to the number of crabs we found within
that same area, this could give us some idea as to how much covering the crabs
prefer to have.

This processing of the eelgrass is
a very simple task, however it’s very time consuming. Blade by blade, I had to
sort out the Z. japonica, from the Z. marina, from the microalgae. Once all
the samples were sorted, each had to be put through a salad spinner to remove any
excess liquid. Those individual samples, separated by species and location were
placed into pre-measured paper lunch sacs, and measured for a wet weight (the amount of mass of a
sample before drying, with water present). The samples were then left in a
drying oven for three days, before being measured for dry weight. There was
approximately 60 separate samples of eelgrass and algae. The results of this
data will be reviewed at a later time.